Speaking of Voting
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You really can't make this up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/22/amazon-union-vote-alabama/
Amazon wants the upcoming unionization election at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse to be held in-person, arguing against National Labor Relations Board guidance to hold mail-in balloting in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
The e-commerce giant late Thursday appealed the ruling by an NLRB hearing officer a week ago to allow roughly 6,000 workers to take seven weeks, starting Feb. 8, to cast their ballots by mail to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Amazon argued in one of two filings that the agency’s pandemic-voting policy is flawed, in part because it fails to define what a covid-19 “outbreak” actually is.
That guidance “reflected assumptions developed comparatively earlier in the pandemic — before scientific understanding of the virus and possible precautions had developed to where it is today,” Amazon says in the filing.
A union spokeswoman declined to comment on the filing. An Amazon spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Amazon’s two filings ask the full board of the NLRB to review the in-person voting ruling and to stay an election until that matter is decided. The board established the mail-in voting guidelines in November after objections emerged in a union election for nurses at a Michigan hospital.
In the Bessemer union battle, holding in-person voting would require the board to send its staff to a region where the spread of the coronavirus is particularly high, Lisa Henderson, the acting regional director of the NLRB’s Atlanta office, wrote in her decision. Moreover, in-person voting could disenfranchise voters who have covid-19 or are concerned about contracting the disease, she wrote.
“The most important factors in my decision are the safety of all election participants and the enfranchisement of all voters,” Henderson wrote. “Both of these factors weigh in favor of a mail ballot election.”
